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Charlie
Charlie was the Chinese cook aboard the Dutch freighter Star of Borneo in the episode "The Sea Haunt"; when the crew abandons the ship after it was attacked by the eponymous sea-monster, Charlie hides from it in the freighter's ice-box, where he is found by the Quest team. When the monster climbs the ship's mast, Charlie uses the ship's harpoon-gun to shoot the mast, plunging the monster back into the sea. Charlie is presumably rescued along with the Quest team when they are spotted by a search-plane out of Batavia. In appearance, Charlie is a stout, older man with gray hair, dressed in a Chinese round hat, peasant jacket, and short trousers with white stockings and black slippers, in addition to his cook's apron. Charlie appears to be a good cook, since Race praises his cooking even though the only ingredients he has left to prepare are rice and fortune cookies. He seems extremely excitable and a bit erratic; though he initially hides from the "dragon," he later throws a meat-cleaver at it from close range (which bounces off with no effect), and, when in danger of fire, he jumps into the ocean declaring that it would be better to drown than burn, only to cry out for help when he sees that the water is full of sharks. Trivia * Though some question has been raised as to Charlie's ethnicity, there can be little doubt that he is meant to be Chinese, since 1) he offers to sing some Chinese lullabys to Jonny and Hadji, 2) he dresses in a stereotypically Chinese manner, and 3) his voice actor is Chinese-American. * Charlie was voiced by veteran Chinese-American actor Keye Luke, a favorite at Hanna-Barbera (later playing Brak on Space Ghost and Zen Tuo on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!). Luke had gained fame in the 1930's playing the "Number One Son," Lee Chan, of the Chinese-American dectective Charlie Chan (played by Swede Warner Oland). In 1972 Luke would play Charlie Chan himself in Hanna-Barbera's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, the only time that the character has been played by an actor actually of Chinese extraction. * At one point Charlie says he should never have left his "homeland." In 1965, when this episode was made, this may have implied that Charlie was a refugee from the Communist People's Republic of China (an actual citizen would not have received permission to work on a Western (Dutch) ship), a citizen of the Nationalist Republic of China (Taiwan), or less likely one of the Chinese population of Singapore. * Though Charlie at one point swears by "the Great Buddha," he also makes frequent reference to his "honorable ancestors," a practice more common to Confucianist or Taoist belief (though by no means unknown among Buddhists as well). This, again, makes it unlikely that Charlie is a citizen of the People's Republic, where religion is discouraged by the Communist Party. * Since Keye Luke was an actual Chinese speaker, Charlie's first few lines in Chinese are an uncommon example of a character speaking an actual foreign language instead of the more normal foreign-sounding gibberish used by most non-English speaking characters on the show. Category:Characters